the New Pantagruel

Return from Bohemia: Grant Wood and the Promise of American Regionalism

by Bill Kauffman

This is an excerpt of chapter three in Bill Kauffman’s book, Look Homeward, America: In Search of Reactionary Radicals and Front-Porch Anarchists.

America, turn in and find yourself. –Paul Engle

o there we were, my wife, Lucine, our then-nine-year-old daughter, Gretel, and I, driving the gravel roads outside Clear Lake, Iowa, following directions like “first fencerow past the big grain bin,” till we ditched the rental car and walked the narrow half-mile path between corn and soybean fields to the spot where on February 3, 1959, the plane carrying Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper crashed, a tragedy later mythicized by Don McLean in “American Pie” as “the day the music died.” We found the cross and makeshift memorial to the three paleo rock-and-rollers. Lucine detests the har-har leering of the Big Bopper—“Hell-ooooooo Ba-Beeeee!”—but Gretel and I persuaded her to join us in a spirited chorus of “Chantilly Lace,” capped by a hearty “Oh baby that’s what I like!” I imagined the Bopper, a bespangled specter, giving us a lewd wink.

If an Iowa farm is the place where the music died, Iowa writ large is also where the music—American music—was born, and where, in chapbooks of poetry and gleaming brass bands and well-tended graveyards (for everything that dies someday comes back, as a New Jersey regionalist once sang), we find the seeds and pith and guts of a real American culture, as opposed to the unreal America of the TV screen, the ABC-Fox-HBO axis of vile.

Detail of Contempt of Misery; “Frühbürgerliche Revolution in Deutschland” (1987)
(Das Bauernkriegspanorama)
by Werner Tübke

In the summer of 2003 we took a cultural tour of the Upper Midwest. Three slaphappy ghouls in a rent-a-car, watching independent baseball in North Dakota and grave-hopping from Sauk Centre, Minnesota (Sinclair Lewis), to Anamosa (Grant Wood), Mason City (Meredith Willson), and West Branch, Iowa (Herbert Hoover).

Our pilgrimage coincided with the annual “Sinclair Lewis Days,” run by Lewis’s bête noire, the Chamber of Commerce, and featuring a Miss Sauk Centre beauty pageant and a pool tournament. Lewis would have loved it. His headstone in the family plot in Greenwood Cemetery looks out on the new Morningview Drive development, where we may be sure George W. Babbitt IV is chuckling at Jay Leno, boasting of the high school’s new array of computers, and wishing that Sauk Centre would attract a Home Depot.

If our cemetery-tripping seems morbid, North Dakota’s Timothy Murphy asks:

Why are we born with tongues
if not to praise the dead?

The dead, we may be sure, are under no obligation to praise us. Indeed, I rather expect the shade of Buddy Holly was cursing the cacophony as we shouted our eulogy in that Clear Lake cornfield.

Clear Lake, coincidentally, was the site of Grant Wood’s last studio. The painter’s spectacles were every bit as unhip as Buddy Holly’s; Miss Prescott, the Cedar Rapids principal who against all logic gave the absent-minded Wood a teaching job at a critical point, said he “looked dumb.” Slow, halting of speech, geekish in his Devo glasses and goofy gadgets (when making a left turn with his car he stuck out a carved hand with a pointing index finger), Wood, by standing on what he stood for, stood foreground when last American artists might treat American themes with Jeffersonian eye.

Grant Wood was of Quaker stock on his father’s side and Upstate New York matrilineage—a happy combination conducive to a cautious radicalism. He displayed an almost evangelical zeal in promoting the culture of the Midwest, and specifically Iowa, not as cloying encomiast but as a lovingly gimlet-eyed native son. His Iowa regionalism, at once populist and conservatively agrarian, imbued such iconic paintings as American Gothic as well as his long-forgotten but sophisticated and practicable plan for a “revolt against the domination exercised over arts and letters and over much of our thinking and living by Eastern capitals of finance and politics.” Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, and John Steuart Curry, the Midwestern triumvirate of that golden movement and moment known as “Regionalism,” were being echoed by many writers, among them the dozen Southern agrarian authors of I’ll Take My Stand and the unreconstructed Tennessee poet and charter Southern agrarian Donald Davidson in his gallant Attack on Leviathan (1938).

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